YouSaid · the spoken record

Andy Grove

lines on the record: 33
first: 2020-12-21
most recent: 2020-12-21
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“As my teacher Velensky predicted, I managed to swim across the lake. Not without effort, not without setbacks, and with a great deal of help and encouragement from others. I'm still swimming That's where I'll leave the story. If you want to buy this absolutely amazing book and use the link that's in the show notes on your podcast player, at the same time you'll be supporting podcast. That's 159 books down, 1,000 to go. I'll talk to you again soon.”
2020-12-21 · Founders · #159 Andy Grove (Intel) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Andy Grove of the age that he is when he wrote the book he's about 60, 62 somewhere in there, and he's reflecting back on this. He says, I have loved my life in the United States. The doors that the International Rescue Committee and Professor Schmidt opened for me were just the first of many. I went through graduate school and scholarships, got a fantastic job at Fairchild Semiconductor, the high flying company of its day, then participated in the founding of Intel, which in time has become the largest maker of semiconductors in the world. I rose to be its chief executive officer, a position I held for eleven years. I have continued to be amazed by the fact that as I progress through school and my career, no one has ever resented my success on the account of me being an immigrant. I became a US citizen. I was named Time Magazine's Man of the Year in nineteen ninety seven. My two daughters now have children of their own. In fact, it was the arrival of the grandchildren that stimulated me to tell myself.”
2020-12-21 · Founders · #159 Andy Grove (Intel) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's where he decides he's going to set up. And I just want to tie this before I close. I want to tie this together. Soon after graduation, we piled into an old car and drove out to California so I could go to graduate school at the University of California Berkeley. Somewhere on Highway 40, I saw a sign indicating that we were nearing the Sierra Nevada. The words jump straight out of the Carl May books I had read when I was a kid. Now here I was about to drive through those mythical mountains. I fell in love with the San Francisco Bay Area from the moment I drove through the tunnel north of San Francisco and saw the city glittering in the sunshine. It was everything Professor had suggested would be. It was beautiful. It was friendly. It became home. I've lived in the Bay Area ever since. And now we reach”
2020-12-21 · Founders · #159 Andy Grove (Intel) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So he hung on to people who were experts in their field, even if there were holdovers from the previous regime. Remember what he said? Communist call all the shots and they're morons. These people couldn't run a gas station, much less a country. It's ridiculous. Now it seemed that my father had recommended someone for a particular post and the government didn't approve. Criticism in the newspaper was something to be taken very seriously. It usually signified trouble ahead. Andy is 15 years old when this is happening. My uncle and his son-in-law were arrested in the middle of the night. My aunt showed up at our house the next morning, frightened and utterly helpless. Nobody would say where they were taken or why. There were no charges and no one to inquire to. They were just gone. A few days later my father was fired from his job. He was told that in any future job he would not be allowed to earn more than one fourth of its previous salary. People stopped dropping by our apartment to visit my father.”
2020-12-21 · Founders · #159 Andy Grove (Intel) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So he's a little chubby at this time. When's it growing out of that? But he was made fun of a lot for being pudgy. Or dare to push me around. I borrowed the Hornblower books from my neighborhood library after I finished the entire series. I went back and read them all over again. The thought really appealed to me to be able to display what I was really like by transposing myself into an imaginary person set in an imaginary scene undertaking imaginary adventures, this thought excited me. At this point they're in the car, it's him, his mother, and his father. They're driving to go check on one of these livestock facilities that his father's in charge of. His mother's reading newspaper, she's freaking out because in the newspaper he's accusing his father and other people.”
2020-12-21 · Founders · #159 Andy Grove (Intel) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So Andy continues about his love for reading, and he does something that's really smart. Think about how awkward the transition going into puberty, transition from childhood to adulthood is, now having to do it under a communist dictatorship, having to go through five previous five years of war. And so he adopts, he finds strength in fictional characters and then imagines what it would be like if he could have the traits of the people he so admired. He says, I discovered C.S. Forrester's books about the 19th century British Navy captorio hornblower. Something about the character really intrigued me, although I wouldn't tell anyone this. I fancied myself as a later day captain Hornblower, a man of few but deeply thought out words, carrying the weight of the world on my shoulders. He's thirteen. Living a rich inner life that my classmates had never suspected. Had they known what I was really like, I imagine they would be a lot more respectful. Nobody would call me a puzzle.”
2020-12-21 · Founders · #159 Andy Grove (Intel) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then traveling all around Hungary, he's forced to, like he's a young boy. This is about this paragraph about to read to you. The memories that are embedded in the young life of Andy Grove are just remarkable and not in a good way. The road to the farm went past would have been my grandparents' house. I always had a tight feeling in my chest when we went by because now because by now I knew my relatives had been taken from that house to be killed. Those relatives wind up dying. They were transferred to Auschwitz. Only one, I think there was like nine of them. One of them survived. And the only reason the Germans at the time let that one survive was because she was trained, she was skilled as a seamstress, and they needed to make clothing and uniforms and everything else for the German military.”
2020-12-21 · Founders · #159 Andy Grove (Intel) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Having nationalized all businesses, the government turns its attention to the school system. I had to change schools. There was nothing to be done. The communist government called all the shots. What a sentence. The communist government called all the shots. They increasingly interfered with our daily life. They took away my parents' business. They uprooted me from school. All in the name of some political philosophy that I didn't really understand.”
2020-12-21 · Founders · #159 Andy Grove (Intel) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now we get to the enter the incompetence of communism. In August 1948, the communists won and took charge of the government. Soon private companies were taken over by the state. First, large companies were nationalized. Then they moved on to smaller companies. In short order, our dairy business was nationalized. So his father, they were like middle class, maybe lower middle class. They had a small dairy business. And that was obviously taken over. My father and everybody else was given other jobs. My father became the director of a state company in charge of livestock breeding and exports. Things were changing increasingly, employing. The incompetence of communism can never be overstated. Increasingly imploring somebody was considered the same as exploiting them. It was something the communist governed frowned on.”
2020-12-21 · Founders · #159 Andy Grove (Intel) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My parents had a private signal between the two of them. They would whistle the first few bars of a popular song. I was annoyed and protested that she was imagining things. Just then the doorbell rang. My mother turned and ran down the hall. An emaciated man filthy and in a ragged soldier's uniform was standing at the open door. My mother stopped as if she had turned into a statue. Then in a moment took off and leapt on the man, embracing him in an all encompassing hug. I stood there, alone and forgotten. I thought this must be my father. His arms and legs were like sticks. He looked worse than a beggar.”
2020-12-21 · Founders · #159 Andy Grove (Intel) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was much use anyway because I had no recollection of my father. We got home tired and thirsty and warily sat down in the kitchen to have something to drink. All of a sudden my mother sat bolt upright in her chair and stared at the wall so intently that you would think it had just spoken to her. I asked her what's the matter? She hushed me and continued to listen. Then she said, greatly agitated, I thought I heard your father's whistle.”
2020-12-21 · Founders · #159 Andy Grove (Intel) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The war was effectively over in early April of 1945. The Russian soldiers were still there, marching around and standing guard. Much as the Germans had done a year earlier, I could barely remember a time when soldiers hadn't been a backdrop to my everyday life. So they wound up getting their old apartment back. It was being occupied. Furniture was destroyed, but at least they have a lot of their old stuff and they're back in the old apartment. In early September, my mother got worried that trains were coming from the prison camp in Russia where she somehow thought my father had been. So we again went out to the railroad station to look for my father. They did this multiple times. The train station was a distance away and we had to walk both ways. I was getting very impatient. I was tired from the long, fruitless walk and from standing on the hard concrete platform, getting jostled by the crowds, watching the men streaming by and looking in vain for my father. The next day we did again. I didn't want to go.”
2020-12-21 · Founders · #159 Andy Grove (Intel) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is how Andy remembers the end of World War II. Now keep in mind he's about nine years old. His father has been gone. As far as they know, he's missing. He's disappeared. They haven't seen or heard from him in three years.”
2020-12-21 · Founders · #159 Andy Grove (Intel) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To break up her trip, we stopped at the apartment of a friend of my parents. This friend was a Jew who had been a highly decorated officer in the Hungarian army. Because of that, he did not have to move into the Jewish house or a ghetto. He was exempt from those regulations. So they get to their apartment of their friend. We went up to the third floor of the building where he lived and knocked on his door, but neither he nor his family were in that apartment anymore. Some neighbors heard our knocking and came out to tell us what happened. The arrow crossed, this is a German government, I guess occupied Hungary. The Arrow Cross had taken him and his wife and his children, who were younger than I. Out to an empty lot nearby and shot the entire family. After a moment of silence, my mother turned around and left, pulling me by my hand.”
2020-12-21 · Founders · #159 Andy Grove (Intel) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sometimes it's really hard not to hate humans and what they're capable of. They are raping these women every day. After a short while they hear that the Germans have been pushed out of Budapest, so they immediately go back, and this is what they see when they get back to Budapest. We kept walking at one intersection, I saw a man lying in the street face down. His legs and arms sprawled out. It was the first time I'd ever seen a dead body. I kept turning my head to look at him. My mother yanked on my hand and growled Look where you're going. We kept walking. Down one street I could see a strange shape as we got nearer I realized it was a dead horse. An old man crouched next to it, next to it, sawing away the horse's frozen leg with a kitchen knife, cutting off slivers of meat and dropping them in a bucket that was next to him. He didn't look at us as we walked past. I felt as if I was in a dream. The city didn't look like the Budapest I'd left behind just a few weeks before. In barely two months it had become a different world.”
2020-12-21 · Founders · #159 Andy Grove (Intel) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She handed me to one of the women in another cellar. Then she went back to our cellar. The neighbor woman took me into her bed and put her arm around me. I lay there, stunned and full of apprehension. I had no idea what was happening to my mother or what would happen to both of us. There was so much pressure in my chest that I could barely breathe. After a while, my mother came back for me. She was very tense and angry. She picked me up again, which was unusual because I was too big for her to carry me. She carried me to bed and we went to sleep. Later on that night some more Russians came into our cellar. My mother yelled at them, something about how all three of the women had already done it today. After some hesitation, the Russians”
2020-12-21 · Founders · #159 Andy Grove (Intel) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So he's living literally through a war zone. The Russians arrive in the town he's in. They're pushing out the Germans. And yet, as Andy's about to describe for us, they trade out one level of brutality with another. Russian soldier came in and waved the old man and the two other women out of the cellar. He closed the door and fastened it from the inside and propped his machine gun against it. He sat down at the side of our bed. He was grinning. He poked his forefinger against my mother's chest, then pointed it at himself. The Russian soldier kept grinning and again poked his finger against my mother's chest. My mother got out of bed and picked me up. Soldier moved his gun and opened the door and let my mother carry me out.”
2020-12-21 · Founders · #159 Andy Grove (Intel) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A family seeking in refugees, and this is the first close call that Andy has to dying. One morning shortly after I came back from the toilet, there was an explosion outside in the courtyard. It didn't sound like a plank dropping at all. It sounded the way I imagined an explosion would sound. A big, long, loud, reverberating bang, followed by the random, rattling noise made by the debris of rooftiles, bricks, and pieces of wood flying around. The silence after the explosion was deep. People sat frozen in place as if waiting for more explosions to come. After a while, when nothing else happened, we went out and noticed that fragments of a shell had torn into the door leading into the toilet. I stared at the fragments. I had gone through that door just a few minutes earlier.”
2020-12-21 · Founders · #159 Andy Grove (Intel) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In this part, it's really hard to read because if you have kids, you automatically think like, oh my God, imagine if my kids ever had to go through this. And I just couldn't imagine my son having to experience what Andy, like he's a young boy, maybe seven, eight years old at this time. He says, I didn't care where we were going. I cared only about two things. I was with my mother and I had to learn a new name. I understood that I had to memorize it to the point where it was part of me. I couldn't make a mistake. I was afraid I would forget it. So all along the train ride, Watching my reflections in the glass disappearing and muttering inaudibly Andre Smoutzvik, Andres Malchik, Andre Malchevik over and over again. They're in the countryside, they're being sheltered.”
2020-12-21 · Founders · #159 Andy Grove (Intel) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She sat down with me on a sofa and explained that she now had official papers for us. According to these papers, her name was Maria Melsevik. The paper kept her first real name and I was her son, Andresvik. I was to forget that my name was Ever Groff. This is the Hungarian version of Grove. He Americanizes it when he leaves. And I had to absolutely positively learn this new name, Andres Mousevic and the story to go with it”
2020-12-21 · Founders · #159 Andy Grove (Intel) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The only reason she did see her son again is because one of his father's former non-Jewish business partners just happens to see her being escorted to the police station, recognizes mother, had a friend in the police force, and was instantly able to call him, pull some strings, and have her released. So once she's released, she realizes I have got to get my son out of here. We've got to leave. So they wind up believing Budapest. They're going to go stay with friends and relatives in a small town. And this is where she tries to hide the fact that they're Jewish. It says the third time my mother came, she came to take me away. Nobody else was around. This is the strength of this woman is unbelievable.”
2020-12-21 · Founders · #159 Andy Grove (Intel) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There was no one else in the apartment, it's just him as mother. I didn't know what was going on. All I could do was wait. My mother returned in a couple hours shaken up. She told me that the man who came for her was a policeman who arrested her along with the superintendent's wife, that's a non-Jewish person feeding Jewish people was against the law, and my mother had broken the law by allowing the wife to provide us with food, Jesus. My mother said that she was incredibly listen to this. This is my mother said that she was incredibly lucky to be back. As the policeman was taking her in, he told her that she should have made a more proper goodbye because she'd probably never see me again.”
2020-12-21 · Founders · #159 Andy Grove (Intel) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People avoided looking at us, even people whom we knew wouldn't meet our eyes. It was as if a barrier was growing between us and everyone else. They're also restricting how much food they can have. So he's a young boy. He's growing. He needs obviously a lot more calories. He's not getting them. A non-Jewish neighbor of his winds up feeding him. She gives him chicken soup and mashed potatoes, which is like a delicacy. And he talks about it was so great. I enjoyed every bit of it, but look what happens the next day. The next day there were loud knocks on our door when my mother opened the door. A strange man stood there with a grim look on his face. Words were exchanged between the two of them. My mother came over to me and said, I have to go away for a while, stand here and wait for me.”
2020-12-21 · Founders · #159 Andy Grove (Intel) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Used to one thing, another thing happened. The next thing that happened was that we were all required to wear a yellow star of David on our jackets. We were forbidden to step outside without wearing one.”
2020-12-21 · Founders · #159 Andy Grove (Intel) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where Andy felt like you have to hide how you really think and how you really feel. Just like his mom saying, hey, we're going to listen to radio. We're trying to get information, but we can't have our neighbors or anybody else that could potentially spying on us know what we're doing. One of the revelations that he reveals later in the book is that for the very first time when he gets to America, he feels like he can be who he is. Like I can actually express my thoughts. I don't have to hide. I don't have to pretend anymore. Later in the summer, the radio disappeared. Jews were no longer permitted to own a radio. So this is a step by step. Germans are starting to put more restrictions on them and then obviously starting to round them up and assassinate them. En mass. Government posters appeared on the walls of buildings describing the latest regulations applying to Jews. Jews were not supposed to mix with other people.”
2020-12-21 · Founders · #159 Andy Grove (Intel) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Dedicates this book to his mom. It says to my mother who gave me the gift of life more than once. That is not an understatement. So now he's back in Budapest with his mother. It says before that summer, listening to the radio was an occasional thing. Now friends came over almost every evening to listen. People started paying a lot more attention to the radio than they had before. He talks about the only way to get information was from newspapers, which printed a lot of lies and the radio, which also telling people lies. And so a lot of it was just rumor and talking to other people. So it says, but at the same time, my mother didn't want anyone outside our apartment to hear us listening to it. She would pull down the blinds and draw the curtains, then turn the radio on at a very low volume. She and her friends would huddle around it with a very serious expression. So that's actually a good point. Now that I'm rereading this after I finish the book, there's many instances regardless of whether the Germans are in charge, or the Russians are in charge.”
2020-12-21 · Founders · #159 Andy Grove (Intel) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So his mom is becoming more and more concerned. She saw alone. She sends her only son. She's worried about the people the Germans killing Jews in Budapest. She sends Andy out into the countryside to stay with friends and relatives. And then it turns out that winds up being a bad idea because they start killing people in the countryside first and then they move to the cities. So she sends another relative to go get him. And they're talking to Andy about, hey, I think he's been there for one or two weeks, something like that. It's like you got to come back to your mom. He says she explained that the Jewish people were going to be taken away. So they start doing the removal and forcing the Jews from the countryside into the concentration camps. The strength, one thing that if you read this book, you'll be struck by is how strong and resilient his mother is. Wait till you have to read to you some of the horrifying things that she had to endure. In fact, he...”
2020-12-21 · Founders · #159 Andy Grove (Intel) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So at this point in the story, the Germans have fully occupied Budapest. They're about to start killing Hungarian Jews, and this is what Andy remembers. That spring, we had many thunderstorms. There's a feeling before a storm breaks that the weather's about to change. You know something is going to happen. The wind stops, the temperature drops, the air gets more humid. Something is going to burst out. That's the kind of feeling there was in the air that spring. Even on clear days, I didn't know what was different. I just knew that something was.”
2020-12-21 · Founders · #159 Andy Grove (Intel) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They will put the Jews in the ghetto. And a year later, the bombing of Budapest starts. So it says from time to time we had air raids. They always happen in the middle of the night when I was sleeping. My mother would reach into my bed and drag me to my feet and dress me while I was still half asleep. I could hear the howling of the sirens as I came awake. Other people streamed out of their apartments, hurrying downstairs to the cellar too. Everyone filled into the room and took their places. Nobody talked much. We never did get hit, but an apartment half a dozen blocks from us did. It looked like a big knife had sliced off the front half of every floor. You could see into the apartments on all four stories, like a doll house. In the back part of each room, the furniture was still in place and the pictures were still on the walls. The front part had fallen off into a big heap of brick, stones, and unidentifiable rocks.”
2020-12-21 · Founders · #159 Andy Grove (Intel) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I didn't know what that meant. I didn't know how people could disappear. Was during some of these conversations that they talked about what they thought was going to be the eventual, what was eventually going to happen. And that was that the Germans were going to round up and put Jews in the ghetto. And this is Andy in kindergarten. This part is wild. Once when my mother was talking with the other war wives, I overheard a phrase that intrigued me. The phrase was, they will put the Jews in a ghetto. I had no idea what a ghetto was, but for some reason the phrase stayed with me. One day I dragged some of the kindergarten tables and chairs over to the wall to make an enclosure. This is at school. I declared that this was the ghetto and that we would put all the Jews inside it. A few of my playmates and I started chanting. They will put the Jews in the ghetto. They will put the Jews in the ghetto. We grab some of the other kids and drag them inside the enclosure. Pretty soon we were all chanting in unison. They will put the Jews in the ghetto.”
2020-12-21 · Founders · #159 Andy Grove (Intel) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Russian front do not return. This is how Andy remembers the aftermath of all the men leaving. The woman would stay up late until the afternoon talking and drinking, talking and drinking, and chain smoking until the air in the room was hazy from their cigarettes. Visitors had often smoked, but I didn't remember anyone ever drinking at our house before. The mood was different. Instead of the laughter and animated conversation that had been used to, everyone seemed preoccupied. I noticed that my mother drank more than the other women. After they left, she often continued to smoke and drink by herself as the light dimmed in the room. It seemed as though her thoughts were very far away. I knew she was thinking about my father. The letters had stopped coming shortly after he was taken away. Then in the spring of nineteen forty three my mother got an official notification saying that my father had disappeared at the front.”
2020-12-21 · Founders · #159 Andy Grove (Intel) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The community in Budapest that Andy lives in is left with little kids, the women, moms, grandmas, and old men. And so we see, it says in 1942, when I was five years old, my father was called up into the army. He was not really a soldier. He and other Jewish men were conscripted to serve in labor battalions clearing roads, building fortifications, and the like. He had been called up for short periods of time before, and each time he came home in a few days or at most a few weeks. This time, though, it was going to be different. When he came home with the news, he was trying to smile. But there was something wrong with his smile. His unit was to leave for the Russian front, and he would not come back any time soon, so later in the book Andy reveals to us that ninety percent of the Jewish people called up to serve at the”
2020-12-21 · Founders · #159 Andy Grove (Intel) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1936. By the time I was twenty, I had lived through a Hungarian fascist dictatorship, German military occupation, the Nazis' final solution, the siege of Budapest by the Soviet Red Army, a period of chaotic democracy in the years immediately after the war, a variety of repressive communist regimes, and a popular uprising that was put down at gunpoint. This is the story of that time and what happened to my family and me. Before I tell my story, it may be helpful to provide some historical context. When I was born, Hungary was governed by the right wing dictatorship aligned with Nazi Germany. During the early years of World War II, Hungary maintained a policy of arm neutrality. However, when Hitler's Germany attacked the Soviet Union in june nineteen forty one, Hungary abandoned that policy and declared war.”
2020-12-21 · Founders · #159 Andy Grove (Intel) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source